Almost all Free Anti-Malware for Android Useless Claims Report

Almost all the free anti-virus tools for Android are ‘useless' and give users a false sense of protection, it has been claimed.

According to a report [PDF version] released by anti-virus certification company AV-Test, the organisation wanted to see how effective free anti-virus apps on the Android Market were in detecting and removing malware, considering the rising number of threats to the platform.

Apart from using the top free Android anti-virus apps, the Germany based organisation also used commercial anti-virus software F-Secure Mobile Security and Kaspersky Mobile Security.

It was discovered that the paid software were able to detect 50 percent of the inactive malware used in the tests. Among the free anti-virus apps, Zoner AntiVirus Free scored the top marks by discovering 32 percent of the malware.

Most of the free security software were able to detect only 10 percent of the malware while some were able to detect nothing at all.

"The best results claimed the products of Kaspersky and F-Secure, which detected at least 50% of all malware samples already in inactive state. The best free app was Zoner AntiVirus Free with 32% detected malicious apps. All other scanners detected at best 10% of the apps, some didn't detect anything at all," the report read.